PLANETARY SCIENCE SUPPORTS A YOUNG COSMOS

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Creationist scientist Dr Russell Humphreys shows a young-age creation perspective has real explanatory power for understanding magnetic fields of planets, moons, and other objects in space. The Ganymede moon of Jupiter has been shown to have its own magnetic field which should not be the case if the Cosmos is billions of years old. Humphreys became famous because he successfully predicted the magnetic field of Uranus before Voyager 2 flew by the Uranus system in 1986. The strength of the magnetic field was a complete surprise to evolutionists, though not to creationists, as creationist physicist Dr. Russell Humphreys, using Biblical assumptions, had accurately predicted the strength two years previously!

This is a complex article but at least make sure you read the Conclusion.

Ganymede is the largest moon (Jupiter) in the solar system (figure 1). With a radius of 2,634 km, Ganymede is slightly larger than the planet Mercury. A unique feature of Ganymede is that it possesses its own intrinsic magnetic field. To planetary scientists, it has been a challenge to explain how an object of Ganymede’s size could still possess its own magnetic field after over 4 Ga. After billions of years, an object of Ganymede’s size would be expected to have cooled down so that there would not be adequate heat to drive a magnetic dynamo. A dynamo requires a molten iron core that can have a convection motion of the fluid, which carries an electric current. But for Ganymede, the iron core is only approximately 700–800 km in radius. Ganymede may not have a solid iron core but has a liquid iron core surrounded by a silicate mantle, and then layers of water ice over the mantle.

Ganymede is influenced by the strong magnetic field of Jupiter, but there is a good consensus among scientists that it possesses its own intrinsic field. The Galileo spacecraft conducted magnetometer measurements which have been analyzed in relation to Jupiter’s field. Ganymede’s main dipole field was measured as 719 nanotesla (nT) and is tilted 176° in relation to its own spin axis. This makes it roughly antiparallel to Jupiter’s magnetic field.

The magnetic field model of Dr. D. Russel Humphreys has been more successful than old-age magnetic dynamo theories. Humphreys applied his model to the magnetic fields of Earth, Uranus, Neptune, Mercury, our Sun, and bodies in our solar system. Mercury is slightly smaller than Ganymede but possesses a larger iron core with both solid and liquid layers. Humphreys’ model proposed that when God created the planets he initially made them out of water in the manner described for Earth in Genesis 1 and 2 Peter 3, “out of water”.

This model has significant advantages over the old-age dynamo model. The dynamo model requires a molten conducting core such as liquid iron. It also requires convection motion of the fluid and is very dependent on the size of the core and the rate of rotation of the planet. But in Humphreys’ model, the core need not actually be melted, it just needs to be a conductor. The initial magnetic field from creation decays to the present. This has been described as ‘free decay’ because the field decreases in intensity over thousands of years. Humphreys’ model assumes a young age for the Earth and solar system and leads to realistic values for the magnetic dipole moment for Earth, Mercury, and the other planets. This makes Humphreys’ model more broadly applicable than dynamo theories. Thus, it can be applied to Ganymede as well, as Humphreys has done.

In Humphreys’ model for the creation of magnetic fields, the exact composition of the iron core after creation is not known, but this does not create a problem in applying the model. The core’s composition is estimated by interior structure models that attempt to match the overall density of the moon to gravity measurements taken by spacecraft (the Galileo mission). Today, Ganymede is believed to have an ice shell of roughly 200 km, then a silicate mantle of about 1,700 km, and this leaves the core as roughly 700–800 km in radius. However, these are only rough approximations. If the core is smaller, it needs to have a composition closer to pure iron in order to generate the measured magnetic field. But if the core is larger, then it could have a composition more in a light element such as sulfur (in FeS). In Sohl 2002, an analysis was done of the Galileo gravity data for the Galilean moons of Jupiter. They describe Ganymede’s magnetic field thus:

“Magnetometer measurements of the Galileo spacecraft have shown that Ganymede possesses an intrinsic magnetic field with equatorial and polar field strengths at the surface of 750 and 1,200 nT, respectively.”

They go on to give a range of values on the size of the Ganymede core: “The ice shell was suggested to be about 800 km thick. The core may have a radius between 400 and 1,300 km.” All these values are consistent with Humphreys’ model.

Conclusions

At creation, should we assume that the composition of the core was uniform throughout? This is a simplifying assumption but not really a requirement. If there was a composition gradient in the core initially where it was closer to pure iron at the core-mantle boundary but possessed more FeS at the bottom of the core, this would be unstable and so sinking iron ‘snow’ and rising FeS would be possible. Such a composition gradient could alter how rapidly the magnetic field decays for some period of time until the core reached a more stable uniform composition. So, to this author, it seems the ‘iron snow’ concept is possible, but it would not drive a dynamo in Ganymede, and it would not invalidate Humphreys’ magnetic model. Thus, a young-age creation perspective has real explanatory power for understanding magnetic fields of planets, moons, and other objects in space.

This article by Wayne Spencer The iron snow dynamo theory for Ganymede is taken from The Journal of Creation 2022 Volume 36, Issue 3 in the section Perspectives.

The Journal of Creation is the Technical Journal produced by Creation Ministries International (CMI). They also produce the excellent Creation Journal for nontechnical people. Go to http://www.creation.com to subscribe.

DARWIN’S ABOMINABLE MYSTERY

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In 1879, some twenty years after the publication of his famous Origin of Species, Charles Darwin wrote a letter to botanist Dr Joseph Hooker. One sentence, in particular, underscored a vexing problem for evolutionary theory:

“The rapid development as far as we can judge of all the higher plants within recent geological times is an abominable mystery.” By ‘higher plants’ Darwin had in mind the plants he viewed as being the most ‘highly evolved’, i.e. the Angiosperms—plants with flowers (with seeds produced inside the female reproductive organ). As BBC Science put it, “The famous naturalist was haunted by the question of how the first flowering plants evolved. Why are they so beautiful, many have gorgeous scents for us to appreciate

Evolutionarily ‘out-of-place’

Little wonder evolutionary theorists are ‘allergic’ to Precambrian pollen

Buggs refers to “our knowledge of the fossil record” but this has to be selective knowledge. Evolutionists have to ignore or try to explain away various ‘out-of-place’ angiosperm fossils from beneath their supposed first appearance in Cretaceous rocks. For example, fossil “pollen of the Compositae” (the daisy family), which is found all the way down in the Precambrian, is presumed by evolutionists to encompass the time that life first evolved., This would mean flowering plants preceded the allegedly ‘more primitive’ plants, such as algae, mosses, ferns, and pine trees. Little wonder evolutionary theorists are ‘allergic’ to Precambrian pollen!

Flowers from the beginning

The Bible actually places the origin of all plants—algae, mosses, ferns, pine trees, and flowering plants—on Day 3 of Creation Week; not billions of years ago, but only about 6,000. And from the Bible we can conclude the ‘fossil record’ does not display the order of evolution over long time periods, but rather the order of burial during and since the global Flood of Noah’s day, about 4,500 years ago.

How come our schools and universities that teach evolution as fact do not present the many impossible facts such as flowers and DNA (complex information that controls all the machinery in cells) that evolution cannot explain.

So, for those who despite the evidence and the Bible’s eyewitness account want to cling doggedly to evolutionary ideas, Darwin’s “abominable mystery” remains. For Bible-believing Christians, however, there is no mystery.

BEAUTY AS FOOD FOR THE SOUL

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“Beauty as food for the soul” comes from C.S. Lewis. The theme of beauty remained a central thread throughout Lewis’s life.

In fact, Jack (C.S. Lewis’s self-chosen childhood nickname) described himself as a beauty hunter. He spent his life seeking to find that place where all the beauty came from and of course he found it, our magnificent creator God. And that pursuit nurtured his work. Beauty, for Lewis, began in the simple beauty of the landscape and transposed itself into the literature Lewis came to love and master.

The more you study Lewis and his writing, the more you find a man of simple yet robust tastes. A man who took the time to imbibe the simplicity of the beauty around him. It was no frivolous pursuit. Beauty, as it turned out, was food for the soul.

  

Lewis enjoyed the habit of walking the garden before breakfast in order to drink in “the beauty of the morning, thanking God for the weather, the roses, the song of the birds, and anything else he could find to enjoy.”

His brother, Warren Lewis noted:

“Jack’s mind was developing and flowering on lines as unpolitical as can be imagined. His letters of the time are full of landscape and romance: they record his discovery of George MacDonald—a turning point in his life—and his first and characteristic delight in Chaucer, Scott, Malory, the Brontës, William Morris, Coleridge, de Quincey, Spenser, Swinburne, Keats.”

When was the last time you took a walk only to pick out the beauties surrounding you, thanking God for them? If you’re anything like me, it’s been too long.

You don’t have to be a literary giant, a great philosopher, or a mystic to understand and appreciate beauty. You just have to be willing to take a walk and, as Tolstoy says, look around you.

“In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.” Leo Tolstoy

THREE PILLARS OF EVOLUTION DEMOLISHED

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Jerry Bergman is a well-known creationist author who has extensively published over many decades and who has taught at several universities. He has taught biology, biochemistry, anatomy and physiology, genetics, and other courses for over 40 years. He has over 1,700 publications in both scholarly and popular science journals and monographs.

The three pillars of evolution identified by Bergman are abiogenesis (aka chemical evolution), natural and sexual selection, and mutations. The author of this book finds all three of these pillars defective as evidence for evolution.

Bergman has examined claims of abiogenesis, the nature of mutations, and the explanatory power of natural selection. As in the title of this book, he has thoroughly demolished them. The monopoly of the theory of evolution, in academia, is all the more irresponsible. In fact, it is puzzling.

Naturalistic origin of life assumed, not demonstrated

Bergman is especially critical of Miller–Urey ‘chemical soup’ explanations for the putative abiogenesis of life, not so much because they are grossly inadequate, but because they are not even seriously examined.

“Producing even simple amino acids and functional proteins requires highly laboratory-controlled experiments. Even under these ideal conditions, the very conditions hypothesized to create amino acids also rapidly destroy proteins” (p. 60).

Finally, ‘chemical soup’ experiments very much confuse the issue. Forming the building blocks of life, by abiogenesis, is the trivial part. The hard part is accounting for the information content necessary for even the most rudimentary form of life. Evolutionistic origin-of-life hypotheses do not even begin to do this!

Most ‘neutral mutations’ are not neutral after all

The next pillar of evolution, examined by Bergman, is that of mutations. The term ‘neutral mutation’ refers to a mutation that neither enhances nor reduces the fitness of the organism bearing it. Evolutionary orthodoxy long held that most mutations are neutral. Bergman challenges this and shows that most ‘neutral’ mutations are mildly deleterious. This creates a new problem for evolution. ‘Neutral’ mutations are not innocent, as previously believed. They do not kill the bearer outright, but, because their harm is subtle, they accumulate with other ‘neutral’ mutations in the genome. Bergman warns, “Even mutations that have ‘little effect’ on health can accumulate both in somatic and germ cells, eventually causing major damage” (p. 120)

Natural selection—an amorphous and misleading term

The third pillar of evolution is identified as natural selection. Bergman has a way with analogies. He compares the claims of natural selection with the statement, “The man is rich because he has money.” Others have characterized the natural selection explanation as a ‘survival of the survivors’ statement.

One must make a clear distinction between the arrival of the fittest and the survival of the fittest. The two, though often conflated, are most certainly not the same. The confusion goes back to the very beginning, as pointed out by Bergman:

“Darwin … portrayed natural selection as equivalent to artificial breeding, thereby making it more difficult to refute natural selection by arguing that it was a real physical force. Claiming that nature does the selecting avoids the requirement of discussing the actual factors involved in the causation events attributed to natural selection. Such obfuscation may have been excusable in Charles Darwin’s day, but is inexcusable in ours” (p. 165).

Natural selection does not even have theoretical explanatory power in many cases. Bergman comments: “Human life consists of many activities that are mentally pleasurable, none of which natural selection convincingly explains. Walking in forests, listening to music, creating poems, doing scientific research, aesthetic enjoyment of nature, and myriads of other activities are often not related to survival, or adaptation in a Darwinian sense. Some writers have struggled in vain to explain the existence by natural selection of our human ability to create music and art, all of which involve extremely complex body and brain systems” (p. 213).

Get the book from Creation Ministries: http://www.creation.com

AMERICA UNDER JUDGEMENT

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In this video, Nelson Walters exposes the main reason why America turned from God. It started in the 1960’s when evolution was adopted by law and therefore universities and schools began teaching exclusively evolution as the means the Cosmos came into existence. God and creation were excluded from education.

In 1968, the US Supreme Court ruled on Epperson v. Arkansas, and the court ruled that allowing the teaching of creation, while disallowing the teaching of evolution, advanced religion, and therefore violated the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution.

In the United States, attempts to introduce intelligent design and creation science in schools led to court rulings that it is religious in nature, and thus cannot be taught in public school science classrooms.

The following two Scriptures reveal what God has to say on the matter.

“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,” Romans 1:20-22

“Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.” Romans 1:24-25

MORE ON THE BIG BANG – Is the Big Bang really scientific?

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Creationist scientists argue that the atheists’ claim that our universe arose from a random ‘explosion’ is absurd. For example, the rate of expansion would have needed to be just right, as even a tiny deviation from the required rate would have been catastrophic. If just a little faster, particles would have simply flown away from each other, never coming together to form stars and planets. If just a little slower, gravity would have pulled everything back together resulting in a violent ‘great crunch’, with no planets and no life. According to Nobel prize-winner, Professor Steven Weinberg, the number determining the required expansion rate (known as the ‘cosmological constant’) would have had to be just to right to within 120 decimal places.10

How realistic is it to believe that an ‘explosion’ just happened to produce an expansion rate this critical?

The expansion rate, however, is just one of many factors that would have had to be ‘fined-tuned’ for the big bang to have produced a universe like ours in which life could exist. For example, unless the masses of the particles that make up atoms, the forces that hold atoms together, and the force of gravity all had the right values, the big bang would have produced a lifeless universe. Creation scientists argue that a process that is this critical could not have occurred by chance.

Conclusion

Christians need not be intimidated into accepting secular accounts of origins. Big bang theory only appears to be scientific because people are exposed only to the evidence that appears to support it. At the same time, nothing is said about its major scientific problems. Big bang theory contradicts the account of creation in Genesis, and Bible-believing creationists should reject it on the authority of God’s word.

Extract from an article by Dominic Statham entitled “Is the Big Bang really scientific?” http://www.creation.com

References and notes

  1. Technically, CMBR is said to date from the 379,000 years after the big bang when atoms were formed. Previously, the energetic nuclei and electrons, as charged particles, would scatter any radiation, but when they combined to form neutral atoms, the universe became transparent to the radiation. Return to text.
  2. Horgan, J., Physicist slams cosmic theory he helped conceive, Scientific American, 1 December 2014; blogs.scientificamerican.com. Return to text.
  3. Burbidge, G. and Hoyle, F., The origin of helium and other light elements, The Astrophysical Journal 509:L1–L3, 10 December 1998. Return to text.
  4. Burbidge, G., The case against primordial nucleosynthesis, in: Hill, V., François, P. and Primas, F., eds, From Lithium to Uranium: Elemental tracers of early cosmic evolution, IAU Symposium Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union 228, Paris, May 23–27, 2005; adsabs.harvard.edu. Return to text.
  5. That is, measurements of ordinary matter density. See wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_tests_ele.html. Return to text.
  6. Hartnett, J., Dark Matter and the Standard Model of particle physics—a search in the ‘Dark’, 28 September 2014. Return to text.
  7. Hartnett, J., Is ‘dark matter’ the ‘unknown god’? Creation 37(2):22–24, April 2015. Return to text.
  8. More precisely, because the wavelength of the light is now longer, it has ‘shifted’ towards the red end of the spectrum. Note that this does not necessarily cause a particular star to ‘look red’. Return to text.
  9. Professor Halton Arp, however, noted that there are many exceptions to this rule, which are difficult for advocates of big bang theory to explain. See Hartnett, J., Big-bang-defying giant of astronomy passes away, 31 December 2013. Return to text.
  10. Weinberg, S., Facing Up: Science and its cultural adversaries, Harvard University Press, USA, pp. 80–81, 2001. Return to text.
  11. Lewis, F.G. and Barnes, L.A., A Fortunate Universe: Life in a finely tuned cosmos, Cambridge University Press, UK, 2016. Return to text.
  12. See also Statham, D., A naturalist’s nightmare [review of Ref. 11], J. Creation 32(1):48–52, April 2018. Return to text.

WHY RADIOMETRIC DATING GIVES AGES OF MILLIONS AND BILLIONS OF YEARS

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A young age for ‘ancient’ granites

When physicist Dr Russell Humphreys was still at Sandia National Laboratories (he now works full-time for the Institute for Creation Research), he and Dr John Baumgardner (still with Los Alamos National Laboratory) were both convinced that they knew the direction in which to look for a definitive answer to the puzzle of why radiometric dating consistently gives ages of millions and billions of years.

picture – Linear accelerator used in radiometric dating.

Others had tried to find an answer in geological processes—e.g. the pattern was caused by the way the magma was emplaced or how it crystallized. This is indeed the answer in some cases.2,3 But Drs Humphreys and Baumgardner realized that in other cases there were many independent lines of evidence that suggested that huge amounts of radioactive decay had indeed taken place. (These include the variety of elements used in ‘standard’ radioisotope dating, mature uranium radiohalos and fission track dating.) It would be hard to imagine that geologic processes alone could explain all these. Rather, there was likely to be an answer that concerned the nuclear decay processes themselves.

From the eyewitness testimony of God’s Word, the billions of years that such vast amounts of radioactive processes would normally suggest had not taken place. So it was clear that the assumption of a constant, slow decay process was wrong. There must have been speeded-up decay, perhaps in a huge burst associated with Creation Week and/or a separate burst at the time of the Flood.

There is now powerful confirmatory evidence that at least one episode of drastically accelerated decay has indeed been the case, building on the work of Dr Robert Gentry on helium retention in zircons. The landmark RATE paper,4 though technical, can be summarized as follows:

  • When uranium decays to lead, a by-product of this process is the formation of helium, a very light, inert gas, which readily escapes from rock.
  • Certain crystals called zircons, obtained from drilling into very deep granites, contain uranium which has partly decayed into lead.
  • By measuring the amount of uranium and ‘radiogenic lead’ in these crystals, one can calculate that, if the decay rate has been constant, about 1.5 billion years must have passed. (This is consistent with the geologic ‘age’ assigned to the granites in which these zircons are found.)
  • However, there is a significant proportion of helium from that ‘1.5 billion years of decay’ still inside the zircons. This is, at first glance, surprising for long-agers, because of the ease with which one would expect helium (with its tiny, light, unreactive atoms) to escape from the spaces within the crystal structure. There should surely be hardly any left, because with such a slow buildup, it should be seeping out continually and not accumulating.
  • Drawing any conclusions from the above depends, of course, on actually measuring the rate at which helium leaks out of zircons. This is what one of the RATE papers reports on. The samples were sent (without any hint that it was a creationist project) to a world-class expert on helium diffusion from minerals to measure these rates. The consistent answer: the helium does indeed seep out quickly over a wide range of temperatures. In fact, the results show that because of all the helium still in the zircons, these crystals (and since this is Precambrian basement granite, by implication the whole earth) could not be older than 14,000 years. In other words, in only a few thousand years, 1.5 billion years’ worth (at today’s rates) of radioactive decay has taken place. Interestingly, the data have since been refined and updated to give a date of 5,680 (± 2,000) years.
  • The paper looks at the various avenues a long-ager might take by which to wriggle out of these powerful implications, but there seems to be little hope for them unless they can show that the techniques used to obtain the results were seriously flawed.

The Bible clearly tells us that God created a mature universe: Adam was a man, not a baby, the trees and plants mature and on day six Adam could see all of the stars in heaven. God tells us that He stretched out the heavens at creation on day four. The Cosmos could only have been created by a being outside of His creation with miraculous powers.

Big Bang from nothing does not explain the complex ordered universe that is so evident, it is certainly not good science.

Taken from an article by Dr. Carl Weiland “Radiometric dating breakthroughs” http://www.creation.com

4. Humphreys, D. et al., Helium diffusion rates support accelerated nuclear decay, icr.org, 16 October 2003. Return to text.

COMPLEXITY OF THE GENOME

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Although evolutionary theory says all creatures descended from a common ancestor, when one looks at animals today (or in the fossil record), they appear to be unique creations with the ability to change to fit their environments. 

A creature’s ability to live and change is programmed at the deepest levels of the genome in ways we do not fully understand. It is inconceivable that it could have evolved by random chance.

What we can now see with an electron microscope is that the human genome works as a four-dimensional ‘computer’: our three billion letter sequence of DNA is able to turn sections of itself on and off; it is coiled into 3D fractal spheres where sections folded near each other combine to create new levels of information; it changes shape over time to expose different areas of DNA needed to create tens of thousands of different proteins.

This level of complexity is not just limited to the genome, but can be seen in the interdependent relationships between living creatures throughout every ecosystem. Such highly-engineered structures and relationships can only exist if they are created simultaneously in a short space of time — which is exactly how Genesis says God created in six normal days.

MASSIVE DECLINE IN AMERICANS WHO BELIEVE THE BIBLE IS THE ACTUAL WORD OF GOD

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It’s no secret the Bible is receiving less support in contemporary culture, but new statistics from Gallup showcase how much modern culture is impacting Americans’ views and perceptions of Scripture.  The survey, which has attracted attention since its release, contains several eye-opening findings.

Just 20% now believe the Bible is the literal word of God, down from 30% in 2011 and 24% in 2017. These statistics are remarkable considering 40% said the same in 1980. The steep decline puts definitive numbers to the moral slide many Christians have discussed over the past few decades. Meanwhile, there’s a new record high among Americans who believe the Bible is a collection of “fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.” Just 10% held this view in 1980, though that proportion has swelled to 29% in 2022, the highest ever recorded by Gallup.

it appears the most notable development is the shift away from a literal approach and toward the belief Scripture is “fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.” As Gallup noted, these findings coincide with a decrease in Americans’ perceived importance of religion in their lives. Just 44% said in 2022 religion is very important in their lives, down from 60% in 2002. It’s interesting to note that, during the same timeframe, the belief the Bible is the actual word of God also plummeted from 30% to 20%.

There is no doubt in mind that this has been due to academia swallowing the lie of evolution as the cause of the Cosmos. The prime mover for evolution was Charles Darwin who believed that natural selection was the mechanism by which evolution brought this complex world into existence. Natural selection can only select from what is already in existence it does not take us from GOO to YOU. The only other mechanism that science can add is mutation and yet mutation is the loss of information from the DNA. It does not add complex information once again to take us from GOO TO YOU.

Dr Dean Kenyon – From Darwinist to Creationist

In 1969, Dr. Dean Kenyon, a Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University, co-authored the book entitled Biochemical Predestination which was adopted in the USA as a graduate textbook and was regarded as the seminal work on the naturalistic formation of living cells from the chemicals of the earth.
In the 1980s Kenyon realised that the discovery of DNA revealed that complex information on the DNA controlled all of the complex machinery that the electron microscope revealed is in every cell. There are manufacturing units that make all of the chemicals needed for life and transport devices to take these complex chemicals to where they are needed in the organism. All evidence of complex design that only an Intelligent Designer with an intelligence beyond our comprehension could construct.

It is beyond my comprehension that evolution is still being taught as fact in our schools and universities. For more evidence to support creation go to http://www.creation.com where you will find that many Ph.D. scientists are now proponents of Intelligent Design.

If you want the truth about this Intelligent Designer you need to go to His revealed Word to us. The Bible reveals that He controls everything that happens in His world and is capable of ensuring that what is in it is inerrant.

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” 2 Timothy 3:16-17

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” John 1:1-5

CLIMATE CHANGE ALARMISTS NEED TO SEE THIS

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Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is doing well, in fact great. But the popular media won’t report this good news, but here is what a knowledgeable expert on the reef has to say. Dr. Peter Ridd a geophysicist, physical oceanographer, and inventor — has worked on the Great Barrier Reef since 1984 and has written over 100 scientific publications. Now an adjunct fellow at The Institute of Public Affairs, he was fired in 2018 from teaching at Australia’s James Cook University after criticizing exaggerations about reef damage. Dr. Ridd is also a member of the CO2 Coalition of Arlington, Virginia.  

The Great Barrier Reef is made up of approximately 3,000 reefs covering an area nearly the size of California off Australia’s eastern coast. The condition of its coral is frequently referenced as an indicator of the reef’s health, regularly in the context of the supposed damage global warming is doing to the planet. 

The reef now has more coral than any time since records began in 1986, according to the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS). There is roughly 20 percent more coral on the GBR than last year, which itself equaled a previous record year. All three major regions of the reef now have excellent coral cover and AIMS states that two regions are at record-breaking high levels.  

As of the latest 2022 survey of the GBR, coral covered 34 percent of the seabed, double the lowest coverage recorded in 2012. There are many types of ecosystems on reefs other than coral – 34% is a remarkably high number. 

This coral health exists despite four supposedly massively destructive and unprecedented bleaching events striking parts of the reef since 2016 – all allegedly due to climate change and one as recently as this year. Coral reefs typically take five to 10 years to recover from major damage, so how can GBR be enjoying such good health this soon? Is it possible that reef-science institutions exaggerated the damage in the first place to advance the global warming narrative? Perhaps. 

However, 36 years of AIMS data show that large amounts of coral occasionally die — usually from cyclones, hot-water bleaching, or starfish plagues — but that recovery is often fast. For example, the Cooktown region suffered a moderate coral loss after a 2016 bleaching event but had recovered by 2021. By far, the biggest loss of coral was after Cyclone Hamish smashed the southern half of the reef in 2009. Recovery was largely complete by 2016. 

These marine events, which have been going on for millennia, are akin to terrestrial bushfires from which the land quickly recuperates. However, untrustworthy institutions of science and other climate alarmists use them to foster hysteria over a climate that has vacillated between warmth and cold for as long as they have been observed.

These same purveyors of hyperbole then ignore or downplay news of the reef’s convalescence. For example, last year’s good news of coral coverage matching previous records was dismissed by claims that only the fast-growing coral had recovered. Poppycock! It is these species — staghorn and plate coral — that are most delicate and susceptible to damage and most obvious in their recovery. 

 

Staghorn and plate coral — are most delicate and susceptible to damage and most obvious in their recovery.

The exceptional news this year is that almost every region of the reef is doing extremely well. For so much of the reef’s coral to be this healthy at the same time is very unusual. Normally, a large chunk of the reef is recovering from a major cyclone that drags down the average. So when the reef’s overall coverage is at today’s level of more than thirty percent of the area, the GBR’s health is indeed good. 

This overall health is only apparent if the condition of the entire reef is reported. For whatever reason, AIMS stopped in 2017 averaging regional data to provide a composite view of the reef’s condition. I had to do that calculation for recent years myself to get a complete picture. Is this another instance of obscuring positive data? 

Those who would play down the news of exceptional reef health should consider the unnecessary emotional damage being inflicted on children worried about their future. Elementary school students in America speak of their premature demise because of a faux climate emergency. A 2019 Australian survey reported that “around half of the residents, tourists and tourist operators surveyed, and almost one-quarter of fishers, report significant Reef Grief.” 

God’s amazing creation has exceptional recuperative powers that provide further proof of intelligent design not evolution by random chance.